


Alright Sweetie, Thrill Me (Plato Never Wrote One Like This)

by sazzafraz



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, F/M, Rule 63, sex swapped everyone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-11
Updated: 2012-03-11
Packaged: 2017-11-01 19:21:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/360341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sazzafraz/pseuds/sazzafraz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her mother names her Joan after Jeanne D’Arc and thinks that with that one act she’d basically already written the rest of the story. Her mother is wrong. The story of Sebastian Moran.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alright Sweetie, Thrill Me (Plato Never Wrote One Like This)

**Author's Note:**

> So, um, this story is hella nasty and really gross. God, I don't even know how this happened.

Her mother names her Joan after Jeanne D’Arc and thinks that with that one act she’d basically already written the rest of the story. Her mother is wrong.

Her life, the bits she cares to care about, are stitched between classical fiction horrors of an abusive childhood and hunting seasons learning how to be anyone but herself. There’s her father, a monster, her mother, a victim and a whole cast of other characters she would quite happily write off the page. It’s not even an interesting novel. Daddy wanted a son. Mother has been rinsing and washing this cycle till she’s got all the wrinkles out. They are professionals at it. Soulmates. The only useful thing being Joan Sebastian Moran taught her was to shoot and even that just made her angrier.

Her father dies and her mother pretends she didn’t kill him. She inherits money and they spend a very long time pretending nothing bad happened. Something grows in her, something with claws and teeth and a viciousness she can’t control. Her mother finds another man to fill the void left by her father, this one hell bent on making her submit. She bites his arm when he tries to force her down. She is no victim.

Her mother scolds her when she breaks his wrist and prays, again, for her soul. She’s fairly sure heaven doesn’t think much of her soul. 

\-- 

Puberty is like a hammer to the face.

A rack, not unimpressive, to go with her snarl and cigarettes to disguise the sharp edges of her teeth. She’s popular, somehow, and uncaring about it.

There are wealthy, exclusive schools and parties she hates and boys she lets fuck her. Motorcycles and maybe more than a few fights. Eventually she’s old enough to rip out her old self and find something new. She ends up a professional fuck up, has all her little twitches and anger lighters lined up in a row. Floating from one place to another till she hits an army sign up and says, _well, I haven’t had any other bad ideas in awhile._

She's eager, flourishing her name on the paperwork in the same way she was taught in school. There’s an odd curl to her hands, claws, the shifting predator in her head lengthening its claws. She rearranges her name  
and dumps the martyr angle. It’s never been a good fit.

The man she hands her paperwork to looks her in the eyes accidentally. Sebastian will never know it but that was the first time she gave someone nightmares.

\--

The TiMER phenomenon happens while she’s busy playing War.

A company finds the solution to the world’s biggest problem –finding someone to love you, and suddenly, for a small price everyone can find someone to sit with them when they’re old and grey and long since unattractive. Having a piece of tech in your arm that counts down to when you meet you ‘perfect match’ is the must do. The world changes into a place of less divorce rates and more premarital bed hopping. People find their soul mates, marry, have babies who also grow up buying into the world’s most brilliant corporate gimmick and meanwhile, meanwhile Seb is in hell having the time of her fucking life. 

The Military makes a deal and every solider is fitted with a TiMER. Two find their other halves immediately, TiMERs beeping away. She scowls as she gets hers; it sets itself immediately, numbers running to rearrange themselves. In a moment of weakness she’s never felt before she thinks of her parents and wraps a piece of bandage around her wrist, never looking at the numbers. 

She shoots more bullets into things than she has to that day, just to make up for it.

\--

It’s somewhere in India, covered in blood, singing away some small hours with a cigarette she’d pilfered somewhere that she thinks she could get used to this.

\--

The war ends for her though, long before she's glutted. A discharge, some papers and a lot of frowns. No one should enjoy killing, the psychiatrists say, no one should do it as well as she does. And yes, this is true. Seb just doesn’t care for their opinion on the matter. She spends more years wandering, getting angrier and hungrier for something she can’t make herself say. A hunt. _The_ hunt. Something that will make the monster beating on her head shut up.

\--

This is how she meets Jim.

She's working a low paying, high risk security job for a charity ball in a tux that isn’t cut right. The last smoke break was about an hour longer ago then she’s comfortable with and she would like to take a knife to the man with the faux monocle leering at her.

Jemima Moriarity, Jim to the people she intimidates, is wearing an ostentatious statement gown in the middle of a masked white and gold ball when they first meet. Her gown is designer, that much is obvious. Red and black and made entirely of feathers with a mask that’s huge and overdone, something that should swallow her whole, make her look ridiculous. This is the first, hard, rule about Jim. She wears everything. Murder, treason, arson and avant garde monstrosities. There is nothing that engulfs her, makes her less than who she is. No matter who she wears or what she does Jim Moriarity will always, always be the first thing people notice. 

Seb is willing to admit she’s fascinated.

There’s a beeping sound. Two actually. Moriarity looks down at her wrist and then straight over at her. The beeping continues and Seb swallows a laugh. She thinks about it again and when the laugh comes up she lets it out. _Of course this woman. Of course now._

Jemima tilts her head, assessing, ‘That’s rather rude,’ she says as she saunters closer, mask coming off and a smile tucked in the corners of her mouth, huge and manic, ‘after all, you’ve been waiting your entire life to meet me.’

Seb smiles back. Yes, she rather has.

\--

The world takes a moment to scream.

\--

About two hours after they meet they’re both fucked out and lazing around Sebs shitty one room apartment. Seb is smoking.

‘I know what you’re looking for.’

Jim is backed by moonlight, naked, and Seb has the absurd idea to teach her. She doesn’t.

‘And what would that be?’ She rearranges the blankets around her, TiMER pressed against her forehead, cool against the sweat.

‘I know why you hunt. And one day, when I decide you need to know, I’ll tell you.’

She kicks off her blankets, scars openly displayed, it seems vitally important that she never let Moriarity think she’s weak, ‘And then what?’

Jim looks surprised, and then angry and then mildly pleased, ‘And then we will march on hell and make it beautiful again.’

Seb smiles. A saint in hell, that she could do.

\--

There are a lot of important things that happen between meeting Jim and meeting Sherlock Holmes. There are lots of people who are killed and who are hurt and who are burnt out. Jim would cluck her tongue and say that the most important, the _only_ important one of these things is Martin Hooper.

\--

‘Did you know,’ Jim says carefully as she slides on her geeky exterior and prepares to meet the gateway to what may be the true love of her life, ‘that I spent hours trying to decide what to wear when I met you?’

It’s an obnoxiously normal statement from the one woman in the world who has never been normal. Seb holds her tongue between her teeth, bites down.

‘And this?’ she asks, letting a smidgen of the anger burn through. Seb can tell when she’s being played, learnt it at her mothers’ knee.

Jim hums under her breath, ‘The knight is the most unpredictable piece on the board.’

‘He’s a knight?’

Jim rolls her eyes, ‘No, darling, that’s you.’ she pauses and tugs down her shirt a little. ‘When a pawn reaches the 8th rank it must choose a different position. He’s not there yet, of course, but he will be. Dear little Martin has no idea what he’s let himself in for.’

Seb raises an eyebrow and doesn’t comment. Let the genii squabble amongst themselves; she’s just here for the thrill of it.

\--

And so goes the desecration of Martin Hooper.

\--

She spends one uneventful London evening watching them fuck on her couch. There are cameras and she’s stuck in the next room, head phones playing Don Giovanni, a gun aimed in the vague direction of Martins head. Martin grunts and bumps and grinds away on top and Jim makes comical faces because she knows, as she always does, when Seb is watching her. 

She eats an apple, cuts it open and uses the tip of her knife to flick out seeds. Jim makes a sound of discomfort, Martin must have figured out what that appendage is actually for, and Seb drops her knife and aims the gun back at his head. She doesn’t care about the fucking, not even a little bit. Hell, she sat in a chair and held a gun to a guys’ head while Jim went down on him once. 

Martin bumps and grinds his way back to being a mediocre sex partner. Seb relaxes and picks up a book. Her music player dies halfway through the second act, just in time with the final act on her couch. Jim winks.

In a week Jim will have gotten everything she needs out of Martin, Sherlock will meet his first, true, enemy and Seb will listen to Don Giovanni all the way through. 

\--

She hears about Joan Watson for a week before Jim starts waxing on about Sherlock.

That one, in retrospect, might be her fault.

Jim says, ‘Her parents named her after Joan of Arc.’

Joan Sebastian Moran slips up for the first time in too many years, says, ‘That’s unfortunate.’

Jemima smiles like she’s just won the battle that decides the war.

\--

She sees Joan Watson for the first time at the end of her favourite rifle. It’s not loaded but there are additional laser pointers because Jemima thought it would be the height of wit.

Joan Watson says something dead pan and mouthy in a way she knows Jim would love. 

_Yes,_ she thinks, _it is unfortunate._

\--

Joan Watson will kill Sebastian Moran. This is a fact everyone but Watson knows.

\--

After the Great Game but before Ian Adler there is an interlude between Jim and a river in Russia. 

Jim marches into a river, finds somewhere deep and sits down until the water nearly covers her head. Seb starts forward, a suicide attempt, she thinks, but Jim holds up her hand and says, ‘wait, love, this is the best part.’

Jim ducks under the water and stays for a half a minute, a minute and a half, too long. 

Just as Seb is shrugging off her coat to go in after her Jim bursts out of the water and shrieks ‘Ta da!’ 

Seb stops. Jim has her usual manic gleam and her chest is heaving, she’s not shaking, not shivering, she walks out of the water and grabs Sebs face in her hands. They claw her face, icy and biting.

Jim brings their foreheads together, ‘There is no God or saints or sinners, love, there’s just you and me and the hunt.’

She whispers something else, too, into the curve of her ear and in that moment Seb knows why they were brought together. Seb covers Jims’ hands with her own and for the first time since she watched the blood bleed out of her fathers’ chest, the monster is quiet. 

\--

And _this_ will be called the final seduction of Sebastian Moran.

\--

More people die. More pieces are moved. Jim moves closer to her crescendo, the closing act of her masterpiece.

And Seb, well, she worries. The writing on the wall is disquieting. She’s not afraid of dying and she knows that Jim will not waste her. There’s some perverse pleasure in knowing that Jim considers her the only piece on the board not worth losing at a moment’s notice. She’s not stupid, she knows the name for people like Jim, knows it well enough to know she is the flipside of that particular coin. The socio to Jims’ psycho. She is not easy to lose but she is not irreplaceable.

She sits at a cafe watching Sherlock and Watson pass by. There’s tension in Watsons shoulders. She texts Jim and waits an extra twenty minutes before leaving. Jim replies with several exclamation marks and a smiley face. The first notes of the last act are playing and the two main players are just gagging for the ending.

Sherlock Holmes is just as brilliant and thrilled to play as Jemima Moriarity. Seb imagines Joan Watson is just as worried. Not that she can blame her. There’s something on the edge of her tongue. Some twist in the narrative she’s not quite catching.

The writing is coming up _worrying._

\--

It ends. They die. Close the curtains.

\--

She stands at Jim’s grave only when it’s snowing.

Smokes half a pack and looks at the headstone. Every discarded butt firmly put out in the snow in front of her. She’s watched Joan Watson do the same. Minus the smoking and plus crying. 

Idiot

If she knew the bumps of her Sherlock like Seb knows the curves of Jim she’d know that they don’t get to just die. They walk out of rivers and fires unscathed. It’s the knights, the Joan of Arcs, who get burnt and who drown. 

Joan ‘Sebastian’ Moran will, eventually, be laid to rest here. This she knows. No one will smoke on her grave. She won’t be a martyr and she won’t be a victim, not by her own thinking, and the only other person who’s ever mattered is waiting in hell for her. 

She puts out her cigarette.

\--

Joan Moran is a saint in hell, a knight on earth and nothing at all in heaven. 

She doesn’t give two fucks what anyone else thinks.


End file.
